Danish Postmodern

Why are so many people fans of Scandinavian TV?

The Duchess of Cornwall told the creator of “The Killing” that she and Prince Charles watched the show on DVD at the castle.Credit Illustration by Marc Aspinall

In March, as part of the celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall made a weeklong tour of Scandinavia. They began in Norway (wood chopping, fisheries), continued to Sweden (sourdough, warship), and finished in Denmark (bikes, carbon-neutral kindergarten). Apparently, on such junkets, each royal gets to pick a special thing he would like to do, on top of his official duties. The Duchess’s wish was to visit the set of “The Killing,” the Danish television show. So, on the last day of the trip, while her husband played skomager—a Danish form of pool—at a nursing home, Camilla took a car to Slangerup, a town in the countryside near Copenhagen. There the cast and crew of “The Killing,” each season of which covers a single investigation, were shooting at an abandoned scrap yard.

“We were out in the countryside filming, and everyone was smelling the manure from the cows,” Søren Sveistrup, the show’s creator and head writer, recounted. “Camilla told me, ‘My sister called and said there was this Danish show. And then we got the box set, the Prince and I, and we watched the whole thing at our castle in Scotland.’ “

Sofie Gråbøl, who plays the show’s protagonist, the tenacious but emotionally numb detective Sarah Lund, presented Camilla with a modified version of Lund’s trademark sweater, a white-and-black wool pullover patterned with snowflakes.

At one point, Camilla got hold of Gråbøl’s prop gun. She brandished it, cackling, “It was me all along!”

When people ask what’s going on in London these days, I answer, Copenhagen. Like the japonisme-obsessed French of the late nineteenth century, the British have become infatuated with all things Danish. At first, such nation-crushes can be perplexing. Did someone herd some countries into a closet and order them to spin the bottle? But, just as France and Japan share an affinity for good food, judo, and wrapping paper, Britain and Denmark have in common seafaring, drinking, and execrable weather. To Brits, Danes are exotic, but, as one Dane told me recently, “not, like, Hawaii-pineapple exotic.” Brits can relate to Danes, while finding them novel. Not long ago, the Times of London published an article examining “why everyone wants to be Danish.” It covered Danish society (according to scientists, Danes are the world’s happiest people), Danish fashion (“a leather trim here, a matelot stripe and an edgy trilby there”), Danish décor (“Go monochrome”), and Danish sperm donation (last year, more than five hundred British women were artificially inseminated in Denmark—an ad for one clinic read, “Congratulations, it’s a Viking!”). A “How Danish Are You?” quiz asked, “You like your skies a) Blue b) Slate grey c) Slate grey with vultures circling the carrion of slaughtered youth.” It further probed the pronunciation of the letter “ø” and the plot of “Thumbelina.” The sort of Brit who used to wear driving loafers and say “ciao” is now into knits and “tak.”

Danish television is particularly in vogue. In early 2011, BBC 4 aired “The Killing,” the big show of the previous few years in Denmark, where it is called “Forbrydelsen.” The BBC was, of course, drafting on the recent success of noirish northern fare such as “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” (There is a whole genre of Scandinavian crime novel, featuring a kick-ass heroine, known as femikrimi.) But Danish television was an unknown quantity. Almost four hundred thousand British viewers watched the first episode of the first season—in Danish, with subtitles. (American TV executives preferred to go the remake route, transferring Detective Lund to Seattle, and renaming her Sarah Linden. The show, which ran for two seasons on AMC, was recently cancelled, even though Robert Caro mentioned in an interview that he enjoyed taping it on Sunday evenings. There are rumors that AMC is reconsidering.) By the time the second season aired, that November, the audience had more than doubled. Sarah Lund had become a sufficiently cherished cultural presence that she showed up in Edina Monsoon’s dreams—sweeping an index finger across a tabletop, peeping under a lampshade—in the “Absolutely Fabulous” Christmas special. Piv Bernth, the creative producer of “The Killing,” said recently, “Sofie and I went to do a Q. & A. in London. Everyone was yelling, ‘Woo, say something in Danish!’ “

Seeing how “The Killing” had caught on, BBC 4 introduced “Borgen,” which purported, oxymoronically, to be “a compelling drama series” about Danish coalition politics. (Borgen, or “castle,” is what the Danes call their government building.) It was a hit, drawing admirers such as David Cameron, the British Prime Minister. So was “The Bridge,” an edgy police procedural, co-produced with Swedish partners. To quote from “The Killing Handbook,” by Emma Kennedy, “A virus has swept the Great British islands, blown in on a north wind; and it has brought with it the murky Nordic noir televisual blockbusters that have gripped the nation ever since.” The reception of the shows was unexpected, even for Danes. When asked by the Guardian to account for the popularity of Danish television overseas, the actress Sidse Babett Knudsen—who plays Birgitte Nyborg, Denmark’s first female statsminister, on “Borgen”—replied, “I’ve no idea, because our language is one of the most ugly and limited around. You can’t seduce anyone in Danish; it sounds like you are throwing up.”

In the manner of the Danish food movement, Danish television makes the most of indigenous materials. Its resources include Denmark’s moody light, its attractive architecture, and its relative safety, all of which enhance the dramatic punch of, say, the murder of a teen-age girl, which was the precipitating incident of the first season of “The Killing.” Nick Fraser, a producer of documentaries at the BBC, observed recently, “George Orwell once said something to the effect that the great thing about Catholicism was that it gave you a lot of novels, and the great thing about Scandinavia is that it gives you a lot of crime stories. It’s almost like today’s equivalent of a country house, or the last village green. They’re transpositions of Agatha Christie plots into the contemporary world.” Rain is to Danish television as lichen is to Danish cooking—a native ingredient, available in thousands of varieties, that imbues the finished product with pungency.

Denmark’s progressivism also makes for surprisingly good television. More than seventy per cent of women in Denmark work; ninety-seven per cent of children between the ages of three and five attend day care. Denmark’s Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, of the Social Democrats, actually is a woman. Like Birgitte Nyborg, whose inauguration preceded hers by a year, Thorning-Schmidt has strived to keep her complicated family life from diminishing her work. In August, she publicly denied a rumor that her husband, Stephen Kinnock, who happens to be the son of the former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, is gay. Nyborg, for her part, sees her marriage dissolve in the first season. Then, while dithering over divorce papers, she has a one-night stand with her chauffeur. (Beware minor spoilers throughout this account.) The great thing—in television terms—about the liberalism of Danish society is that, rather than spawning preachy programs about, as Sofie Gråbøl put it to me, “kids and love life and work and blurgh,” it has obviated the need for them. Television writers are free to plumb the realities, rather than the desirability, of gender equality and women’s liberation. Early in the first season of “Borgen,” Katrine Fonsmark—the gorgeous, good-hearted star political reporter—learns that she is pregnant. She has an abortion. “The fact that they had an abortion on ‘Borgen’?” Lisa Albert, a writer and producer for “Mad Men,” told me recently. “And, it was a person who wasn’t peripheral to the plot?” The scene is sad but not grim. Katrine meets no comeuppance. The next time we see her, she’s in the newsroom, rushing out to meet a tipster in a parking lot.

The lighter charms of Danish television include high cheekbones and excellent lighting. I was particularly taken by a copper pendant lamp in the shape of an upside-down artichoke, which, I later learned, while reading an article about how “Borgen” has “excited new interest in classic Danish lights,” was designed in 1958 by Poul Henningsen. (One commenter wrote, “I find ‘Borgen’ has reignited my interest in Scandinavian women. I never noticed the furniture.”) For those watching on DVD, the fun begins even before the opening sequence: subtitles are available in English, Danish, Swedish, and Suomi (Finnish). Moreover, Danish television is a two-for-one deal: drama overlaid with travelogue. Part of the pleasure lies in absorbing stray bits of anthropology, such as the fact that Danish high-school students call their teachers by their first names.

Taken in the aggregate, the shows present as minutely detailed a diorama of urban life as “The Wire,” but it’s Copenhagen, not Baltimore. The city’s open-air entrepreneurs are dealing gløgg. The only downside of Danish television—an excess of inscrutable Swedish jokes (“I’m looking forward to seeing Hasse and Basse and Lasse”)—is offset by the eternal amusement of learning foreign curse words. Lort!

“The Killing,” “Borgen,” and “The Bridge” are all made by Denmark’s public-service broadcaster, DR. Established in 1926, by an act of parliament, DR remained a monopoly of nationwide television until 1988. It dominates Danish cultural life to the extent that, each week, ninety-seven per cent of the population listens to or watches something from its Web site or one of its ten radio stations and six television channels, including DR1 (the flagship channel), DR2 (its artsier offshoot), DRK (for kultur and history), and DR Ramasjang, which—as Lauren Kirchner, of the Web site the Awl, recently pointed out—is producing some of the world’s most “terrific, bizarre” children’s programming, complete with a singing pizza and cross-dressing puppets. DR is required by law to work “in the interest of the people,” providing “a wide range of programs and services comprising news coverage, information, education, art, and entertainment.” Nadia Kløvedal Reich, DR’s head of fiction, told me recently, “We have a huge influence in society. Our main goal is to tell stories about Danish people, in Denmark.”

Danes with televisions pay an annual licensing fee of about four hundred dollars, giving DR a yearly budget of six hundred and sixty million dollars. Because Denmark is small, and relatively heterogeneous, DR can attempt to appeal to almost everyone. It is both mass-oriented and high-minded—CBS and NPR, with a touch of HBO. Like the BBC, it is considered a tent pole of the nation’s identity, and even though it is by definition apolitical, it is suspected in certain quarters of harboring a left-wing agenda. In August, DR presented a series of events to mark the end of Ramadan. One of its board members—an appointee of the nativist Danske Folkeparti—mutinied, comparing the project to “celebrating Hitler Youth.” Morten Hesseldahl, DR’s head of culture, defended the program by speaking of DR’s duty to encourage diversity. On average, each episode of “The Killing” draws sixty-five per cent of the audience share, which is like having a Super Bowl every Sunday night for ten weeks in a row.

In September, I visited DR’s headquarters, built in 2003 on the site of a former marsh on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The glass-and-steel campus, which houses three thousand employees, includes offices, newsrooms, production studios, storerooms, and sets. Hesseldahl received me in a concert hall that Jean Nouvel had rendered in shades of red and orange, as though it were the inside of a meteor. The Danish National Symphony Orchestra was performing Debussy and Ravel that evening. “My job is to keep people on track that we are here for a reason,” Hesseldahl said. “When you are a public broadcaster, you not only want to educate the public, you want to help them to be wise.”

One of DR’s competitive advantages is its centralization, which allows its employees to exploit decades’ worth of accumulated institutional knowledge. A showrunner can float a plot point by a specialist on the news desk. A producer can get a backdrop made in minutes in the downstairs workshop, where, amid clouds of sawdust, I noticed a large wooden letter. “Oh, that’s the ‘X’ from ‘The X Factor,’ “ someone said.

At one point, as I sat in the lobby, two youngsters walked by carrying paper plates heaped with salad. I had the feeling that I knew them, even though I knew no one in Copenhagen. It turned out that they were the actors who play Birgitte Nyborg’s children. Later, I walked past Studio 8, a hangar-like space that houses a replica of the Danish Prime Minister’s suite of offices at Christiansborg Palace. The costume department was in the basement. There were moose heads, dozens of rocking chairs, a room entirely filled with stools. Umbrellas were arranged by category: Old, New, Plastic, Children’s, Chinese, Bag. This was the hit factory—European television’s Motown Records, 1966.

I took the elevator to the fourth floor, where “Borgen” is produced. Adam Price, its creator, also happens to be one of Denmark’s most beloved television chefs. He and his brother James have a cooking show, “Eating with the Prices.” Their catchphrase is “lots of butter”—they’ll do an episode on “the food that killed Elvis,” or an hour called “Silence of the Lambs.” Price, a voluble man with spiky blond highlights, got the idea for “Borgen” at the gym, when he overheard a “really tattooed, muscled young guy” on the treadmill next to him professing apathy toward the 2007 elections. “I was thinking about how we live in one of the oldest democracies on earth, but we can’t really stand to have to vote,” he recalled. Whether because DR is a public broadcaster, accountable to politicians, or because Price is an idealist, “Borgen,” which has just shot a third season, has been relatively indifferent to the satirical possibilities of Danish politics. (As a way to jump-start the economy, Prime Minister Thorning-Schmidt—known to detractors as Gucci Helle, for her expensive clothing—suggested that everyone work twelve minutes longer each day.) Price told me, of the show’s genesis, “This sounds very idealistic in an almost nauseating way, but I wanted to salute democracy. I didn’t want to write a show where all of the politicians are devious dirty bastards constantly trying to sugar their own cake.”

Jeppe Gjervig Gram, one of the show’s three writers, received me. He is a remarkably courteous young man, with a red beard and glasses as round as golf balls. He led me to the writers’ room. An airy space, with a big table and whiteboards, it brought to mind a driver’s-ed classroom. Gjervig Gram said, “We made a pact with Adam that, of course, he would be the showrunner, but that we would have a very democratic writers’ room. Whenever someone didn’t like a decision, we would try to find another way. It’s been a playful room, and we’ve really been enjoying ourselves.” The walls hosted head shots, maps, a chart listing the members of the Folketing, Denmark’s parliament. A white pillar was covered with printouts and sticky notes, like shingles. “We call that the Crying Wall,” Gjervig Gram said. He explained that the pieces of paper bore ideas for future plot twists. One of them was a newspaper article about a neighborhood association in Copenhagen that had passed an ordinance requiring residents to greet each other by saying “Hello.”

In addition to its success in Denmark and in the U.K., “Borgen” is syndicated in such countries as South Korea and Brazil, with a growing following in the United States. Andrew Romano, of Newsweek, recently called it “the best political show ever.” Alessandra Stanley, the television critic for the Times, praised its “sympathetic and layered” depiction of “the female condition,” while pointing out that, for American viewers, the show is “almost impossible to find on screen.” (HBO has a version in development, which seems problematic: once you Americanize “Borgen,” you convert it right back to its source material, “The West Wing.”) Owing to the nature of Danish politics, however, “Borgen” almost didn’t get made. “We’re not as colorful as the U.S. or Britain; we don’t have huge sex scandals,” Ask Rostrup, DR’s political editor, told me. “Our ambition was always: Can we make people watch something as boring as Danish politics?”

Denmark has eight major political parties. None of them have held absolute power since 1909; instead, they tend to form coalition governments, in ever-changing permutations, with parliamentary minorities. The result is a system that is stable, in that it privileges coöperation, but technically fragile, in that an administration can break up at any time. The four center-right parties are headed by men; the four center-left parties are headed by women. Practicing a sort of cinematic foraging, the makers of “Borgen” have turned the system’s complexity to their advantage. Rostrup said, “With eight party leaders, if you want to talk characters, you have some characters.” The milieu offers additional fodder in that the lives of the country’s politicians are not very different from those of its citizens. “Society is very transparent, the power level is low,” Uffe Elbaek, Denmark’s Minister for Culture, told me when I met him at his office, before he rode off on his ten-speed. (Elbaek recently stepped down, amid claims that he had used the office to benefit his husband.) Elbaek, a former activist, believed that “Borgen” affected the outcome of Denmark’s last election. “You can’t prove it, but it created a public awareness that it was not weird to see a female P.M.,” he said. He got the call for the culture-minister job while he was watching “Borgen.”

It is almost axiomatic that when you ask someone for his secret recipe he will tell you that no secret recipe exists. But DR makes television to very explicit specs, upon which its employees are happy to elaborate. DR now produces only original material, but until twenty-five years ago half of its repertoire consisted of filmed plays. In the nineteen-nineties, “two game-changers,” as Gjervig Gram called them, overturned the status quo. First, the Danish film scene flourished, spawning the Dogme 95 movement, in which directors such as Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg filmed pure, realistic stories in an austere style. “Danish television producers were inspired—not necessarily by Dogme’s specific values, but by the way Dogme had made it on the world stage,” the Guardian writer Patrick Kingsley explains in his new book, “How to Be Danish.” There is an unusual amount of crossover in Denmark between the worlds of film and television. Nearly all the country’s leading directors, cinematographers, and scriptwriters are graduates of the state-funded National Film School of Denmark. Eva Novrup Redvall, an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication at the University of Copenhagen, has written that the school’s screenwriting department fosters a “shared language between professions.” In 1994, von Trier made “The Kingdom,” a melancholy DR miniseries about life in the neurosurgery ward of Copenhagen’s largest hospital. DR uses the school as a farm system, hiring talented young alumni and pairing them with trusted veterans.

The second thing that revolutionized Danish television was a trip to America. In the mid-nineties, DR sent several of its top executives and producers to Los Angeles, where they visited the sets of “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” “L.A. Law,” and “24.” They returned to Denmark with new concepts: writers’ rooms, showrunners, multi-episode series. “From then on, we were consciously trying to professionalize,” Piv Bernth, of “The Killing,” said. Gjervig Gram explained, “We said, ‘We’re going to do it the American way,’ but it took some years to find the Danish way to do it the American way.”

The first hallmark of the Danish way is a principle that DR calls “one vision.” This means, essentially, that the writer is king. A ten-episode season of a show like “Borgen” is made on a relatively small budget of about eight million dollars, but DR lavishes its writers with time and indulgence. An incubation period of several years is customary. “I think it’s very important that every one of us stands guard around the author’s mission,” Morten Hesseldahl told me. “It’s a romantic impression of how the artist should work.”

Despite the touchiness of “Borgen” ’s subject matter, Gjervig Gram could think of only two instances in which political concerns had interfered with the creative process. For the show’s first episode, the writers wanted to introduce Svend Åge Saltum, the leader of the extreme-right party, with a shot of his feet, clad in clunky, provincial-looking health shoes. Executives objected, on the ground that the image was condescending. Price took the fight to the head of DR. The shot stayed. Unfortunately, Price—mindful of the international incident caused in 2005 by a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoons of Muhammad and craving room to maneuver artistically—caved on the issue of calling certain countries by their real names. Thus, Birgitte Nyborg travels to Kharoun (an East African nation ravaged by warring religious factions) and negotiates with Turgisia (a former Soviet state with a questionable human-rights record)—two of the most ridiculous fake nations since the Republic of Matobo, Nicole Kidman’s homeland in “The Interpreter.”

The “double story,” which mandates that a show must possess an ethical dimension, is DR’s other cherished precept. “We are very cautious about always having an extra layer,” Hesseldahl said. “Of course, we want to be entertaining, but, at the same time, we intend to deal with other subjects. Those could be social problems in Greenland, or how a mother deals with a mentally vulnerable daughter, or how a woman goes for power in a world that is under transformation. All of these subjects we would like to introduce, not in a textbook way but in a way where it’s part of the drama. It gives a depth, even when we are telling more straightforward thrillers like ‘The Killing.’ “ In a sense, the guessing game is a loss leader for DR. “The Killing” is as much a whydunnit as a whodunnit, asking viewers to solve social dilemmas along with murders. Camilla Hammerich, the producer of “Borgen,” told me, “It’s almost like school television. You need to learn something. What we always want when an episode is over is to have something that people can discuss with family while drinking coffee.”

Price characterized the show’s style as folkelig—easy, accessible. “I always throw in a little humor,” he said. He continued, “The funny thing is that ‘Borgen’ is a big, popular show in Denmark. Because it’s about politics, it’s also considered kind of intellectual, but the moment it travels to the U.K. it becomes almost art house.” “Borgen” ’s writers make a distinction between the esoteric world of a show like “24,” which strives for “fascination,” and the relatable world of their show, which aims to foster “identification.” “If you have an idea for a niche show, you just have to sack it or go somewhere else,” Gjervig Gram told me. “You couldn’t make ‘Breaking Bad’ at DR.” When I asked Nadia Kløvedal Reich whether DR’s pedagogical approach stifled creativity, she said, “Our job is not to be avant-garde. Our job is to tell some damn good stories that have a huge identification and, at the same time, tell us something about the society we live in.”

Like Denmark’s chefs and its filmmakers, its television writers believe in establishing well-defined aims. “Borgen” ’s dogmas include never having a scene in which one of the three main characters isn’t present (“to heighten identification”); asking the question “Can you be in power and remain yourself?” (“We want to say yes”); and not mentioning any real political events that took place after 1982. The writers had a fourth principle, which they had to abandon after a few episodes. As adepts of “The West Wing,” they wanted to have the characters speak more quickly than is customary on Danish television. Gjervig Gram recalled, “Ingolf Gabold O.K.’d that we could write scripts that were seventy pages for sixty minutes, instead of sixty pages, but it just didn’t work.” Gabold, a grand old man of Danish drama, and a former DR executive, who supervised “Borgen” ’s first three seasons, explained, “Not that the Danish audience isn’t intelligent, but you have a certain New York-Washington Jewish language code, a way of thinking that is fast and intelligent. You couldn’t do that in Denmark. You can’t make lingual plot points as elegant and smashing in Danish. That means we can’t do neurosis very fast.”

“The Killing” has two rules: the sun can never shine, and Sarah can never smile. “It’s dark and it’s cold and it’s wet,” Sofie Gråbøl said, when I met her one afternoon for tea. “There’s this beautiful poem that says the year in Denmark has sixteen months: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, November, November, November, November, and December.”

Søren Sveistrup, “The Killing” ’s creator, pitched the show in the bar of the Sofitel in Manhattan, where some DR executives were celebrating after winning an Emmy for “Nikolai and Julie,” a more poignant “Friends.” His idea: a slow-burning series that examined the tentacular implications of a single murder in the course of ten episodes. (Ultimately, the first season had twenty episodes, which turned out to be too many. For the second season, DR went back to ten.)

“Maybe because they’d won an Emmy, they were a little more loose,” Sveistrup said, when I visited him in September.

The staff of “The Killing” prefers to work from DR’s old headquarters, in a run-down one-story concrete block thirty minutes outside of town. They share a parking lot with several discount supermarkets; the other sides of the building abut abandoned lots. The day I visited, Sveistrup, who has a pale complexion and a close-shaved head, was wearing a plaid flannel shirt. He sat at a desk with few personal effects save an ashtray and a can of Pepsi Max.

“I think that ‘Borgen’ and our show are very different,” he said. “I’m not really interested in doing something normal, about everyday life. I’m more interested in myth—the whole idea of Copenhagen being like Thebes. Copenhagen is captured. There’s a big mystery. No one can breathe, no one can move. Sarah Lund is really the old Greek myth, the torch in the darkness trying to liberate the whole system from corruption and damnation.” He paused for a moment. “I’m thinking more Biblical, I’m thinking a large story. It was more Charles Dickens than it was, What did they do in ‘Twin Peaks’?”

Sveistrup was trying, excruciatingly, to write the final scene of the show’s third and concluding season, which had been filming for fourteen months. “Writing is devastating every time,” he said. “I’m actually not very fond of it.” He writes as the series is shooting, sometimes finishing scripts only hours before they are due to be shot. “The way he describes it is he has this whole expensive train coming toward him, and he just has to lay down the tracks,” Gråbøl said. Sveistrup’s methods, along with the rain, infuse the show with a dark nervousness. None of the actors know, until the final episode of a season, whether their characters are actually heroes or villains. “The whole problem is that nothing happens in my head until someone says ‘Action’ on the set,” Sveistrup said. “Then I have to make decisions, and I hate having to make decisions, because I’m always doubting myself.”

While Sveistrup anguished over the ending, a crew was shooting scenes in another part of the building. A permanent set housed “The Killing” ’s gloomy police station, but others were surprisingly makeshift: a little lair with plastic dinosaurs, which was supposed to represent a child’s attic playroom, had been set up in a director’s office. That morning, I had visited a seaside estate, where another crew was shooting on location. Sveistrup had chosen to set the final season amid the financial crisis. The mansion, a baronial place of dark wood and little light, was meant to be the home of a titan of the shipping business. Normally, the crew shoots four scenes a day. Today, they were attempting eight.

“Værsågod! ” someone cried out, using the Danish word for “rolling.”

An actress came down a spiral staircase, talking on the phone. She walked to a gun closet and opened the door. A weapon was missing.

“Tak.” The take was over. Afterward, the actress suggested that the boots she was wearing might not suit a woman who, like her character, was meant to be walking around inside her own home.

“Please find the right boots for Helle,” a voice called over an intercom.

The crew did several more takes. When they were finished, Fabian Wullenweber, the director, said, “Because this is the last episode, every scene is very suspenseful, because we’re so close to solving the case. Everybody is miserable or tired or angry, because everyone’s pushed out over the limit—mostly tired.” He explained that he’d chosen to film from behind the actress, a trademark technique of “The Killing.” He said, “It gives a bit of edginess to the scene to hide her emotion. You have to wait and see what is wrong.”

Some fans have faulted “The Killing” for its grasp of the mechanics of narrative. “If the plot were Sarah’s jumper,” Guy Walters wrote in a Telegraph blog post, “it would have more holes and loose ends than if it had been knitted by a myopic granny with the dee tees.” The British writer Marie Phillips posted on her blog a six-hundred-word forensic interrogation of the show’s trajectory:

Who cut the light cable in Sarah Lund’s apartment building? Why did Vagn give Nanna a necklace before raping and murdering her, and how come he had it on him when he spontaneously went over to the flat to stop her from leaving the country? Given that Jan knew what Vagn looked like, why did he only identify him by his jumper? Is it because all Danish people are obsessed with jumpers? What the fuck was Morten thinking. . . . Seriously, what was the point of the ENTIRE TROELS STORYLINE except that Troels is unfathomably hot.

Sveistrup professed to be unconcerned about such criticisms. “There’s a larger picture, and the larger picture means more to me than ‘Did I remember to explain that he had gloves on?’ “ he said. “Even when I try to anticipate the loose ends, I forget something.”

The staff of “The Killing” is less amenable than the staff of “Borgen” to DR’s sunny corporate talking points. “The ‘double story,’ that’s the policy of the station, but I don’t think that way,” Sveistrup said. He continued, “Because of the focus on DR, the people upstairs are trying to find a ‘What are we doing?,’ they’re trying to see a whole. In my world, it gets very boring when people say they’re talking about a ‘double story.’ I just die inside, because it’s not what I’m doing. I’m only thinking about human beings, about the emotions that people have.”

If “The Killing” has an ethical mission, it is to question Danish society’s self-conception. “I think we sometimes have to look in the mirror and think, We’re not always cozy, we’re not always Hans Christian Andersen,” Sveistrup said. “Lego, Tivoli—that’s our P.R., that’s how we lure you to come here, but we’re just as corrupt and power-sick as everyone else.”

The overlapping plotlines and players of Danish television encourage easy connoisseurship. Hey, isn’t that the grieving father from “The Killing” inspecting fighter jets as the defense minister in “Borgen”? New favorite Danish actor: Bjarne Henriksen. (For cinephiles, Henriksen played the surly cook in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 masterpiece, “Festen.”) For that matter, Adam Price, the “Borgen” creator, co-created “Nikolai and Julie”—Henriksen played a pot dealer in one episode—with Søren Sveistrup, of “The Killing.”

My favorite of the Danish shows I watched was “The Bridge,” which opens with a power outage on the sleek Øresund Bridge, connecting Copenhagen and Malmö, Sweden. When the lights come on, a body appears, straddling the bridge’s center point. Paramedics try to move it; it pulls apart at the midsection, the camera lingering on a wormy display of innards. The legs, which turn out to belong to a Copenhagen prostitute, are in Denmark; the torso, of the Malmö city-council chairwoman, is in Sweden. Saga Norén, of the Malmö C.I.D., is disgusted when Martin Rohde, of the Copenhagen police, breaks protocol to let a woman with a sick family member through, contaminating the crime scene. Rohde is played by Kim Bodnia, who appears in “The Killing” as the bent cop Bülow. He’s a family man with a van, recovering from a vasectomy. Norén, who wears leather pants and drives an olive-green vintage Porsche, is almost a parody of the socially awkward Scandinavian heroine. (After the show aired, the producers of “The Bridge” received letters from mental-health advocates, thanking them for their positive depiction of an Asperger’s character.) In the second episode, after Norén gets off work, she goes to a bar. Club music thumps as a stranger offers to buy her a drink. She turns him down, and he strolls off. A minute later, she approaches him and says, “Listen, why did you walk away? I just didn’t want a drink. Do you want to have sex at my place?” She then freaks her conquest out even more by passing postcoital moments flipping through autopsy pictures.

Norén, with her dubious hygiene and inability to get rhetorical questions, has much in common with Sarah Lund. And “The Bridge” has often been mistaken for a ripoff of “The Killing.” (In reality, its creators began developing the show in 2005.) But one (and not just Camilla) is either a “Killing” or a “Bridge” person. Where “The Killing” is fuzzy, “The Bridge” is clinical. And it has a sense of humor. I had to wonder, when the killer started posting screeds to the Internet on global warming and the exploitation of labor, whether I was seeing some sort of meta-critique of the double story.

In July, FX announced plans to remake “The Bridge” in the United States. Saga Norén, to be played by Diane Kruger, is Sonia Cross; Martin Rohde is Marco Ruiz—detectives working on the border of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. “The Scandinavian version is really dark,” John Landgraf, an executive at FX, told me. “Not just a little dark. I would say even, at times, perversely dark. I want to be really respectful of it, but I think we’re going to try to maybe simplify the plot a little bit.”

No amount of script doctoring would have placated Louise Lamont, a young literary agent, whom I met at a lunch given on November 17th by the Norwegian cook and food writer Signe Johansen to celebrate the première of the third season of “The Killing.” At an apartment in North London, eighteen fans paid sixty dollars each to eat (cured salmon with wild-dill pollen), drink (hot spiced blueberry cocktail), and take part in a “best jumper” contest (the winner, who had knitted her own snowflake crewneck, took home a boxed set of her choice from Arrow Films’ “Nordic Noir” collection). While a group of older women gushed over the good looks of one of the key characters from the first season (“Troels! I could just say it over and over again. Troels!”), Lamont mounted a passionate argument for the superiority of “The Killing.” As she e-mailed me later of its rival, “OOH, LOOK AT HER FLASHY RETRO CAR: how Scandi-stylish; how totally unrelated to her character. Why did they never wear gloves while sifting through a crime scene? Why did they persist in carrying out briefings in an open plan windowed office when they thought either a killer or a mole was amongst them?” She continued, “I felt disappointed in the whole of Scandinavia.”

A few days later, I clicked on the Web site of Le Monde, which featured an article declaring that Danish television was poised to become the hottest thing in France. ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.